"I know I did," said Story; "and was I studying projectiles then? This is the first time I ever heard of it." And I tell that story because it illustrates well enough the divorce between theory and fact which is possible in education. I do not tell it by way of blaming Professor Pierce or Harvard College. Story was not to be an artilleryman, nor were any of the rest of us, so far as we knew. Anyway, the choice of our specialty in life was kept as far distant as was possible. The Picturesque in American Life and Nature' N By Charles Dudley Warner As Interviewed by Clifton Johnson OT long ago I was in the little village of Charlemont, low in the valley of the Deerfield River among the hills of western Massachusetts. Here our now famous essayist and novelist passed several years of his early life, and it is the recollections of this period that make up a large part of the graphic and witty chapters of his "Being a Boy." It was my impression that Mr. Warner was at present living in Hartford, but when I inquired about him of a Charlemont boy I overtook driving a half-dozen cows to pasture through the fog of an autumn morning, I was informed that Charles Dudley Warner was dead. The boy pointed out the house he used to live in, and said that he was buried just up the hillside beyond the house, and I could find a monument there over his grave. He was the first settler in the valley, the boy continued, and the Indians killed him. Did I notice that big sycamore in front of the house right by the side of the road where the watering-trough was? Well, they said that had grown from a crotched stick that Charles Dudley Warner, this early settler, had stuck into the ground there and left. He had used the crotched stick to rest gun on when he was hunting bears and savages, and it took root and grew. his that is very much the same as it was in the days when Mr. Warner was a boy there, and the great sycamore, the murmuring river, the ancient covered bridge, and the steep, scrubby pastures have all their earlier characteristics. Plainfield, eleven miles distant on the hilltops, was Mr. Warner's birthplace, and there he lived till he moved down into the valley when he was seven or eight years of age. The farm-house and the wide-spreading gray barn across the road still stand. I got the impression in Charlemont that Mr. Warner had become a myth and a legend among his native hills, but, later, when I visited Hartford, I found him very much alive. His home is in the suburban part of the city, a modest house of brick, pleasantly secluded in a little grove of tall trees well back from the street. Indoors are everywhere the marks of culture and wide travelpictures, curios, books without end. It was natural that in seeing all this, the spoils of many wanderings, I should ask Mr. Warner his impressions of the picturesque in our life and nature as compared with those of other lands. But we did not have our talk amid the color and variety of these lower rooms. We went upstairs to the author's study, a comparatively barren apartment at the top of the house. The room had a decided air of business, with its plain shelving, its many drawers, desk in the center strewn with papers. I don't know how much more information of the sort this boy held, for I interrupted the long rows of pigeonholes, and its ample with some doubting questions, and he acknowledged that he had lived in Charlemont only three years. But, at any rate, these were the things the other boys had told him. There certainly hillside amid a scanty group of lesser stones, and the man it commemorated was killed by was a monument on the the Indians. The name, however, of this house down the hill is a gray old building Captain Moses Rice. The early settler was taken for this article by Mr. Johnson. The accompanying illustrations are from photographs In what was said we perhaps did not stick to the subject very well, for we continually wandered into asides, but often these were just as interesting as the main topic, and I include them with the rest. My first question was as to how wide an acquaintance Mr. Warner had made with the world in his travels. "I've been about this country pretty well— that is, the United States-and I've made excursions into Mexico and Canada. As to Canada, there was great talk at one time about annexation, and I went up to see about it. I wanted to find out about Canada, and I talked with business men, farmers, politicians, all classes. I saw the people who were running things up there, and I saw the lower classes, the laborers and mechanics. When I stopped at a station, I'd talk with whoever I could get hold of. If I saw a woman over a fence, I'd talk with her-and I really got valuable information from chance ordinary people. They told the truth. I could find out what the Canada weather was from them, while the others would all lie about it-give you a biased view in accord with what it was for their interest for you to believe. The promoters of annexation would say the weather was so and so-never have severe cold or intense heat, or drouth, or floods, etc. The same way about the crops, education, and everything else. But when I wanted facts, I preferred the woman over the fence. "In the first place I went up to Quebec, and then I went across by the Canadian Pacific to Vancouver. I went in a private party, and we had a whole train at our disposal. We did not travel nights, and I saw the whole country, both going and coming, by daylight. Then, when any one looking out of the car window saw a place specially attractive, he'd say, 'Hello! let's stop here and we'd bring the train to a standstill and go out and look around. It was a very delightful trip. But the sum of the whole annexation stir was that the Canadians were very loyal and they didn't want it, and we didn't want it. The excitement was one of those newspaper performances that we have to have about once in so often. "Another part of Canada that I know something of is Nova Scotia and Cape Bre ton. Twichell and I had been up in the Adirondacks a good deal, but we always thought we'd like to see Canada, and finally we started. We went to Nova Scotia, through the Evangeline country, etc., and then we concluded we wanted to get to Baddeckthat is, Cape Breton. It was curious, but it was an unknown country then, and we couldn't get any information about it at St. Johns or anywhere. "The trip was purely for pleasure, and I returned without a single note and no intention of writing anything. But on my way home I stopped in to see Howells, who was then in Boston editing the Atlantic.' I told him some of our experiences, and he said, 'Can't you give us a paper about it?' I said No, I hadn't any memoranda whatever to work from. But he was urgent, and the result was that when I got home I sat down to write a little article about Baddeck. To my surprise, my first paper hardly got me out of Boston Harbor, and by the time I was through I had a book. It never would have been but for Howells's insistence, for I hadn't it in mind to write a single line. The book sold a good deal when it first came out and it sells still, for that matter. It made that country known up there, opened it up, and attracted tourists. "But in most of my writing I don't depend on memory to the extent I did in Baddeck.' Still, nearly everything I write is from very small notes. You can't get the reading public's attention simply by exactness and faithful detail. It's the general impression they want-what you carry away with you. I find that a very well-defined memory of sights and experiences stays with me for a long time. It's a queer thing, but there it is in my mind, and I can pull it out like a thread if I get hold of the end. "For mountain scenery I prefer the Canadian Pacific route to our own. It runs through deeper chasms, and, though the mountains themselves are no higher, they seem so as one looks up at them. It is very like Switzerland. In the warmer countries the chief beauty of the mountains is in the MR. WARNER S BOYHOOD HOME |